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This all-female road movie/coming-of-age movie improves dramatically on the last attempt at this genre -- the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads -- but unfortunately once Zoe (Vanessa Zima) loses her punk friends and hooks up with a British woman named Cecilia (Jenny Seagrove) and her cremated mother, the film loses some of its luster.

Something of a stillborn Frantic, Mexico City puts Stacy Edwards on a mission to find her lost brother, who's gone missing during a layover in the titular city. The embassy is no help, so of course she teams up with a cab driver to scour one of the largest cities in the world all by themselves.

And miraculously, she turns up the evidence, by questioning bar bums and drug dealers, and eventually uncovering some photographs shot by her bro which implicate some Mexican higher-ups in the drug trade.

Somewhere between Living in Oblivion and Cyrano de Bergerac lies Pipe Dream, John Walsh's quirky and endearing little comedy about love, the movies, and plumbing.

Martin Donovan stars as David, an everyday plumber who longs for the torrid love affairs that come with being a movie director. With the help of friend RJ (Kevin Carroll) and a script stolen from client/neighbor Toni (Mary-Louise Parker), David reinvents himself as "David Coppelberg," using Toni's script to stage a casting call and meet endless eligible ladies. But the movie, of course, takes on a life of its own, and soon enough David finds himself in the director's chair, with Toni (who's forgiven him for the theft) coaching him from the back seat.

Jennifer Esposito (Summer of Sam) has a long way to go to reach the A-List if she keeps making direct-to-video pap like The Proposal. Ostensibly a crime thriller where the duplicity runs so thick you just don't know who to trust, The Proposal is really just a cut-rate cop drama with one too many arbitrary plot twists thrown in.

Esposito plays a sexy young cop assigned to help an undercover agent (a mousy Nick Moran) infiltrate a crime ring by posing as his wife. Uh-oh, the mob boss (Stephen Lang) is so devilishly handsome and dashing he puts the moves on the naïve Esposito! Meanwhile, Esposito has entered into a wholly unbelievable romance with the annoying-beyond-belief Moran, ultimately taking the film to an even more unbelievable resolution amidst the inevitable hail of gunfire.

Just about scrapes bottom, if for no other reason than the obnoxious camerawork and editing which has every scene re-enacted rapid-fire multiple times from multiple angles, usually with pulsing music over the whole thing. The story is wholesale idiotic, too: bank robber takes suicidal bank clerk hostage; she demands her death, he refuses. Oh, the hilarity! Anyway, Mr. Lustig, this isn't a music video, pal. Get it together.